When I first heard about Ketamine as a potential option for treatment resistant major depressive disorder, I was shocked. I first heard about ketamine as a an anesthetic that had psychoactive and hallucinogenic properties. I had never imagined it as being a real and viable treatment option for depression. Esketamine, a nasal spray consisting of the S enantiomer of ketamine, has been FDA approved in the treatment for treatment resistant depression. Tt is often associated with high efficacy under the careful dosage and supervision of a psychiatrist.
A ketamine trial consisting of 25 individuals affected by major depression, were given an IV injection of ketamine hydrochloride (Mandal et al., 2019). The dosage was given right below the anesthetic dose at 0.5 mg/kg. The patients baselines were recorded before the treatment, one hour after treatment, after 2 weeks, and then after 1 month of treatment. This study concluded that patients had a significant rapid improvement of depressive symptoms, after ketamine treatment.
Ketamine treatment may be a fast and a seemingly efficient treatment for depression. Depression is truly an serious and can be a lifelong disease, but hope must never be lost when fighting against it. More research still needs to be done on how Ketamine and its dissociative effects play a role in treating depression. Other drugs such as psilocybin and other psychedelics are being studied to learn about their effectiveness in treating psychiatric disorders. How do you feel about these, once illicit drugs, being used for treatment? Do you feel like the risks outweigh the benefits? This new field opens a very unknown field of consciousness, and there are many ethical concerns about the field. However, I feel like this is still a very good start to discovering our identities and the very essence of being human.
Mandal, S., Sinha, V., & Goyal, N. (2019). Efficacy of ketamine therapy in the treatment of depression. Indian Journal of Psychiatry, 61(5), 480. https://doi.org/10.4103/psychiatry.indianjpsychiatry_484_18
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